Build Company Unions

[gilhyle]

Build Company Unions !

At the height of the Second International, it was a commonplace observation that the success of the International arose from combining small socialist groups and labour militants in one organisation.

Sometimes this seemed strange, as in Germany when the Social Democratic Party seemed much more vibrant and powerfull than the trade unions. It seemed even more strange in 1914 when it seemed the influence of the trade unions that led to the great international defeat of the Second International in the face of national chauvinism throughout Europe.

Later when, the syndicalists, who had previously emerged throughout western Europe and North America, enthusiastically joined the new Communist Parties set up after the Russian Revolution, it began to seem a strange observation again. The links to trade union organisation work that gave the early communist parties their vibrancy was lost in the confusion of those hectic years of apparently spontaneous radicalism.

But it was an astute observation and it is an observation worth recalling today. It helps us to analyse the current state of revolutionary socialism.

Capitalism has always thrown up small radical groups, often of petit bourgeois or labour aristcratic origin, arguing for socialist ideas. When such radicals have been kept separate from the developing trade unions and the emerging Labour Party, they have remained ineffectual. This happened, for example, in the UK in the late 19th century. Hyndman’s leadership of the Social Democratic Federation and William Morris’ leadership of the SSF kept such radicals distant from the emerging trade unions.

It is only when such radicals have found a way to influence a mass labour movement that their ideas have become more realistic and more effective.

We are back at a point where the socialists are completely divided from the labour movement. There can be no way forward for socialism as a revolutionary idea until that divide is bridged. Socialism rests on the working class or it is nothing.

Of course, on the face of it, this is a laughable idea. Go back to Tony Blair’s suppine Labour Party ? Devote your energies to building union subs to pay the wages of bloated bureaucracies paying private sector executive salaries to ‘professional’ administrators with no commitment to socialism ? Not exactly attractive is it ?

But nor are the alternatives that are currently touted, more in quiet despair than with any enthusiasm. Anarchism, anti-globalisation movements, new left parties (whether returning to Stalinism or laughably aiming to replace the Labour Party or merely articulating the desirability of mutual respect for all). All these ideas in their various ways constitute an adaptation of the revolutionary socialist strata to liberalism in the face of the unpalatable prospect of adapting to an intractably conservative labour movement.

Of course, we have been here before. In the 1850s-1880s when the trade union movement itself was adapting to liberalism and was confined merely to conservative craft unions. At that time the growth of unions for the unskilled and the widening of the franchise to include the unpropertied gave the socialists their way in. Organising a wider franchise and a wider trade union movement gave the socialists the expérience, the organisational leverage and the credibility to promote socialist ideas. ‘Bide your time’ went one of the most popular socialist songs of the period and socialists committed for 25 years to building the labour movement, following Marx’s own inspiring example from the First International and the encouraged on by Engels and Eleanor Marx until their deaths.

The important observations about those 25 years of intense and incredibly successful work from the late 1880s to the beginning of the First World War are :

Firstly, this work, despite its apparent failure in 1914, laid the basis for the Russian Revolution which depended, critically, for its leadership on the impressively high political cultural level attained within that 2nd International (Surely no dominant ideology has ever had to persist along side such a widespread and articulate alternative ?) Thus it was the foundation for everything that most revolutioanry socialists consider valuable since Marx in their heritage.

Secondly, those who set about these tasks had not done so by way of craven adaptation to the conservative labour movement as it pre-existed. Rather their success lay in their commitment to broadening the ranks of the labour movement to drown the conservative layers in a wider franchise and in the class struggles of the unskilled.

Lets us learn the lessons of that expérience. We are at a point in history when the divide between the socialists from the working class can be bridged. But it can be bridged only by fundamentally altering the structure of the labour movement. This requires a vision of the next stage in the building of the labour movement as crazy as universal suffrage, a Labour Party and a unionised national workforce would have been in the 1870s.

Here is that vision : international franchise and global trade unions. The critical idea is that of global trade unions. I will speak on another occasion about the francshise issues.

We now have shrinking national trade union movements, increasingly confined to the public sector, continuing to rely on national labour law to deliver benefits that are increasingly irrelevant to expanding parts of their national ecnomies, which are increasingly ceasing to be national economies. What the working class needs is trade unions that have stopped going, cap in hand, the national governments which themselves have less and less power. Workers know it. When there is no point in protesting at a plant closure, they wont protest. Damm right to. What the working class need, as always, is trade unions that make the class powerfull by being organised. They no longer have that.

Imagine a trade union that organised all the workers of Microsoft throughout the world, a union that set it as its goal to prevent Microsoft arbitraging national barriers to control its workforce. That is the goal….and one for Hewlett Packard and one for Sony……Then the working class is powerfull again. Then and only then is the historic defeat of the revolutionary crisis of 1914-1923 reversed.

Once upon a time the term ‘company union’ was a negative term. Socialists need to make it a term for capitalists to fear, as they once feared the ‘One Big Union’.

No one but socialists have the vision and the militancy to pursue this goal. By pursuing the outcome which alone can benefit the class, socialists can make themselves the leaders of the working class, not by sly adaptation to what workers already think, but by providing leadership.

The socialists are confined in sects. They have set themselves no tasks but to organise protests or ‘build the party’. They serve the class only by serving themselves. They need, once again to become the union organisers. Not the organisers of the tame unions that serve the debilitated social democratic parties. But the organisers of new unions that actually improve working conditions and wages for their members, unions that subvert market forces.

In this way socialists reunite with the class they aim to lead.

Its time for Joe Hill to go on the road again.

[stevensen]

quite an interesting case. however i do not quite understand the term 'wprkers of microsoft'. there are no workers in microsoft in the traditional sense. the employees are some of the highest paid across the world. i thnk the situation is graduating towards a situation where technology haves will try to dominate technology have nots. the basis for this technology haves have already been laid in labour exploitation of the last century and a half. automation will usher in an era of exclusion of the opressed classes. the attempt should be to give the workers whose contribution helped in the set up of automation their due.

[Jimmie Higgins]

In the past when ideas such as syndicalism were in vogue, the union-movement was on the increase, so there was debate and different attempts to try and find the best wway to organize and lead the movement on.

We have been in a declining period of some 3 decades now (in the US, that is) so if you tried to organize a new union, workers would probably not see the point since they unions they already have don't do anything.

It would be better for us to join our existing unions and try and argue with the rank and file and coworkers against union cooperation with the company; to use historical examples to show our coworkers why a militant rank and file and militant actions could accomplish a turn around in the power of workers.

[Severian]

1) There exist company unions today which are, well, company unions.

2) A union that organizes workers at only one company tends to become tied to that company; its success and even survival depend on the profitability of that company. So even if it doesn't start out as a company-controlled union, it tends to become one.

3) It remains important to organize industrial unions, which set a common pattern for all or most competing companies in a given industry.

4) Of course if these can become international that's a huge step forward. Practical cooperation between unions in different countries is probably the first step towards this.

5)Gravedigger's right that it's necessary to start with the existing unions; communism is the expression of the actually existing class struggle, not the class struggle we might wish for.

[gilhyle]

I have no objection, in principle, to starting with existing unions, though I am realistic about the profound conflicts with the bureaucracy that any attempt to internationalise those unions will generate. But they are fora within which the debate about what is needed can be carried out and, if its won, well and good.

However, I disagree that links between existing unions can deliver. There must be one union that organises all the workers in the international production process. Token internationalism among unions is around for a century. It never has - and never can - deliver a strike in all branches of a multi-national, i.e. it cannot deliver the monoplistic withdrawal of labour to cut off all production by an international manufacturing company and thus destroy its profits.

The point is this. Globalisation means the enemy have rearranged their forces on the battle field. To continue to adopt an out of date disposal of forces is like sending cavalry against machine gun posts - and that is what the labour movement is doing today.

Nor have I any problem with a union that organises more than one company. But it must be at least one full international company. The point is to deliver economic power by delivering the capacity to withdraw labour on a global basis.

Neither of these points, welcome as they are (thanks for them) seems to me to grapple with the heart of the issue.

Once upon a time unions organised crafts, because if you monopolised the craft you had economic power. Then the unions changed tack to monopolise all labour of an economic sector within geo-political units, because that gave you economic power. But that was then. Times have changed. The structure of capitalism has changed. Socialists need to tell the labour movement to respond.

The trade union movement is following the strategies of the palace eunuchs, the T.U. bureaucracies, who prefer to play out a strategy of reliance on national govenments and to allow the manufacturing heartlands of the world economy to become de-unionised. The only way to unionise the manufacturing base of the economy is to replicate its structure.

The ingrained opposition will come because the national leaderships in imperialist countries know that there is nothing in it for them to organise international unions. On the contrary, they will only gain third world members, who pay low dues, are more likely to strike, cant be diverted by saying that the leadership will sort the problem out with the government and who dont buy the life insurance.

The further point is this - even more astonishing. The revolutionary left has no interest in this issue. Yet this is the fundamental issue of class power. Without trade union power, there is no class power and there is no prospect of socialism except built on the power of the working class. The revolutionary left only seems to repeat the policies of the bolsheviks, the rank and file movement, the democratisation and radicalisation of the national union organisations. All good stuff and a necessary part of a correct policy. But that was an adequate policy then. It is an entirely inadequate policy now.

The enemy has outflanked the labour movement. The correct response is to wheel around and face them on the ground they have moved to - globalised, trans-national unions to face globalised, trans-national capital.

And I havent even mentioned the cultural transformation of the labour movement that comes from directily linking workers in imperialist countries up with their real comrades elsewhere in the production chain they participate in - getting them definitively away from support for protectionism and immigration control, cancers in the labour movement.